Re: MIME database

[Alex Vong]

julien lepiller <address@hidden> writes:

> Le 2017-11-28 10:24, address@hidden a écrit :
>> Hello,
>>
>> (Moving the discussions to guix-devel.)
>>
>> address@hidden skribis:
>>
>>> I was wondering why my pdf documents were getting opened in Gimp by
>>> default instead of Evince, so I investigated xdg-open and found it
>>> uses mimeopen as a fallback, and packaged it. Turns out it didn't
>>> make a difference and the issue was simply that the generated
>>> mimedata.cache in xdg-mime-database had Gimp listed before Evince.
>>
>> Oh, good catch.  Profile generation is sensitive to package order; so
>> indeed, if GIMP comes first, it “wins.”
>>
>>> I was also I little confused that xdg-mime-database produces so
>>> many conflicts with shared-mime-info. It's role appears to be to
>>> update the data in shared-mime-data and have it overshadow the
>>> original data when  conflicts are resolved during profile
>>> generation. Looks ugly seeing all those conflicts though.
>>
>> I guess it’s OK in that users normally don’t want to install these
>> packages at all, let alone installing both in the same profile.
>>
>>> I had a look at Fedora's version. They just have a single
>>> shared-mime-data package that runs update-mime-database, but also
>>> they add a few changes to make Evince open pdf's instead of Gimp,
>>> among other changes.
>>>
>>> This makes me feel that it's desirable for us to also tweak
>>> mimedata to make it more sensible -- Pdf's should open in a pdf
>>> reader before it opens in an image editor. It seems unrealistic to
>>> only tweak upstream projects to make all this mimedata mesh
>>> together perfectly to produce ideal default behaviour.
>>
>> Right, so I think the immediate course of action here would be to patch
>> GIMP’s MIME data so that it does not register as a PDF viewer.
>>
>> If we stumble upon other issues like that, we can fix them similarly.
>
> Thanks for investigating that.
>
> Inkscape also wants to open pdf files ;)
>
On my laptop, the recommended programs include evince, libreoffice draw,
gimp, inkscape, imagemagick and winebrowser. I am not running guixsd
though.

>>
>> How does that sound?
>>
>> Thanks for investigating!
>>
>> Ludo’.

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